A new scientific study about eyes and the adorning thereof has suggested that aging women require bifocals sooner than aging men because women have shorter arms and therefore are forced to hold everything they read right up to their beleaguered retinas. Reading at too intimate a distance, as it just so very well yes-indeed happens, increases the strain on one's eyes, thus exacerbating the symptoms of presbyopia, which in technical parlance means crapped-out eyeballs.

Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science recently published a study investigating the reasons behind women needing bifocals at younger ages than men. Though everyone's eyes crap out after a while (mostly because we don't eat enough Vitamin A, spend too much time staring at computer screens and never, ever, ever get nearly enough sleep), the female eye seemed particularly eager to give up and clamor for reading glasses. Researchers found that women often bought bifocals, bifocal contact lenses and reading glasses at earlier ages than men, and also that women's prescriptions for reading glasses tended to be much stronger than men's prescriptions.

Since men and women have about the same focusing ability when staring at nearby objects, researchers looked for another underlying reason behind the bifocal disparity, realizing that women who participated in their study were, generally, shorter than men, with proportionally shorter arms. This meant that they inevitably held objects closer to their faces, thus hastening the onset of eyeball crappiness. The study isn't conclusive, of course, because time keeps marching briskly on and there's always new information to be had, but scientists are fairly confident that diminished reading distances can help explain the stark difference between the eye-enhancing prescriptions. Then again, maybe women are just reading more than men, which nobody involved with this study even seems to have considered, but that could totally be the missing piece to this mystery. I sense that a new career in the ophthalmology racket awaits...